Flamewars have strange sideeffects. A small falling out over maintainership caused me to re-discover a NAS plugin that had been lingering in the mailing-list since May. (who said sort by topic was useless ;). I am trying to integrate that now if only I am able to build NAS so I can make sure it actually works. People who use imake should be spanked to death.

So the good things of today list is:
a) We are getting a new NAS plugin
b) Zeenix also made us a libcaca plugin, so we will soon have coloured asci-art output.
c) And Malcolmn will probably be making his SMIL library public soon.
d)And a team of french hackers want to make a non-linear editor on top of GStreamer as their final year project.
e) And cool things happen with Fluendo.
f) And good things seems to be happening in my private life.
g) And it is Christmas soon.
h) And I will go to Barcelona for new-years to hear a bunch of strangers speak flemish :)
i) And I always forgot, I am buying Ross a new harddisk

You know sometimes life is just all good.

Ok, good news just keeps trickling in Ronald fixed the RGB and seeking issue. Guess we are ready to rock :)

Worked on some of the gnome-media documenation today. Got the GNOME mixer/GNOME volume control documentation to an acceptable level. I also added docs for the gstreamer-properties capplet. But I have a feeling we might need to change it soon so I am not completing the docs until I have discussed it with the other team.

I also cleaned up the documentation categories for GStreamer based apps. So all of them should go to the same place in the yelp now.

To round of I took the following screenshot
of some of the most mature GStreamer apps in action. Time to declare Pax GStreamer :)

Ok, I managed to get a blister on one of my fingertips doing dishes and laundry yesterday; that can’t be a good sign :)

Managed to get GStreamer CVS head compiled yesterday after merging in all the latest changes into the gst-plugins spec file. Unfortunatly it turned out I had forgotten to install the mp3 library which meant no sound for most my movies :)

My plan is to get a nicely working CVS build and then build all the apps available and try and clean up the docs for some of them. The online docs for the mixer for instance currently sucks badly.

Luis managed to ruffle some feathers yesterday, but I think that it actually had some positive effects in terms of increased focus on improving the GNOME integraton modules we maintain. Thomas did a new nautilus-media release and commited his media profiles stuff to gnome-media, Ronald got patching the volume applet and acme to use the new mixer stuff onto his Christmas todo list. And Iain made an unfirm commitment to porting the GNOME cdplayer to use GStreamer during the holidays :)

Video playback is really leaping forward these days and hopefully the remaining basic issues will be quickly resolved so that Julien can get Gst-player up and running towards 0.7/0.8 soon. He has put a lot of work into getting the foundation right, so that he can support video effects and visualizations much more smoothly in the new version.

But now I need to get stuff done here at work so I can go home :)

Wow, just found out about Ettore. For some reason I never really ended up talking with him, but the news of his passing still saddens me. My condolences to his friends and family.

How wonderful life is because you are in the world

thomasvs is trying to scare me with information about New Years Eve being a gathering of The Union of Flemish People in Exile; and me. Well I am not that easily scared, I will prevail ;)

Sometimes its hard to choose ones battles wisely. The recent flag debate on desktop-devel is a good example of an issue I probably should have kept out of alltogheter. Considering I never switch language or keyboard on my machine the current use / future non-use of flags in GNOME aflicts my field of interest about 0%. So why did I let myself get dragged into that debate then? Well I guess my recent work on the Sodipodi flag collection did give me an emotional tie to flags, although the two was not directly connected, as I know Jimmac had planned on using some 3D style flags instead of the 2D style we make in the flag project. Reading through the mails I think what got me to involve myself was the rather provocative style of Jeff from the way he announced his wish for having the flags removed and then ‘concluding’ the debate time and time again based on nothing but his original idea.

Anyway I have pretty much stayed clear of the debate as it resurged lately. There are other issues I actually care about so no need to burn out the candle on the trivialities :) Lets just hope this was a one time issue and not a new trend for how development policy decisions is done, if it is maybe we get a suggestion that gdict needs to get some censorware built in cause GNOME will not be shipped in the Vatican as long as you can look up ‘fuck’ in gdict :)

My new domain registration is ready it seems. Now on to the next step in my world domination plan :)

Strange how things quickly turn around sometimes. Last week I got a letter stating that there would be no salary increase for me this year due to the slowdown in IT spending globally. Today my boss calls me in to her office and asks me if I heard the rumour that some of the consultants at our office would be offered deals from a another consulting firm in order to switch. So I told her that I had gotten a query about wether I could be interested in such an offer and told her that I had replied that I wasn’t really unhappy where I was, but that I was willing to lend an ear to a good offer. She then told me that the rumour wasn’t as much a rumour, but that the head of this consulting company having called her boss saying he was planning to try and hire over some named consultants (and that my name was on that list). And she said that since they wanted to keep me she was working on getting me a higher salary to counter any offer I got.

So from a situation where I thought I get no salary hike this year I will now probably get two offers for a significantly better salary in the next couple of months.
Life is strange sometimes. Of course I still don’t know why the boss of that other company called my boss’s boss, but I guess there might be some kind of parter agreement that makes them having to do that.

On the free software side I managed to add many new Nuvola icons to the Nuvola metatheme in gnome-themes-extras. The themes are now almost completely updated to work with fedora too. I am really looking forward to GTK+ 2.4 in regards to stock icon themeing however as it will improve that part of GNOME theming much.

The norwegian music copyright authority is celebrating their 75th anniversity by offering around 40 000 norwegian songs for free download. While it sounds cool it is rather limited actually, with only format being WMA and you can only download using IE5. Anyway it gave me an opportunity to download a lot of cheesy old norwegian songs. It actually got me started songwriting on my own:

Min kjære stakk sin fot opp i mitt arsle;
jeg ble litt forskrekket, men hvem skulle jeg vel varsle
Det er jo slikt som kan skje;
når man utforsker det å elske.